


He might get burnt but he's in the game

by unicorn_farm



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M, I just needed a kiss okay, Rivalmance (Dragon Age), Smooching, extremely mild angst, he is nicknamed broody for a reason
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:15:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25502713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unicorn_farm/pseuds/unicorn_farm
Summary: Hawke thinks Fenris hates her, but it's a bit more complicated than that.I just really wanted Moar Fenris Kisses.
Relationships: Fenris/Female Hawke
Comments: 6
Kudos: 50





	He might get burnt but he's in the game

**Author's Note:**

> It's basically criminal that I waited nine years to discover I am in love with Fenris.

She was letting the mages leave.

Fenris glared at Marian Hawke as she set her ran her hands over her staff, checking for nicks. “You are letting them leave?” he asked, his fingers twitching on the hilt of his still-uncleaned sword, ironically dripping in the blood of blood mages. The source of their power was now the evidence of their deaths.

“This discussion can wait,” Hawke said to Fenris as she swung her staff in its holster along her back, seemingly assured of its fidelity. In the flickering light of the mages’ torches, Fenris could see her jaw was set in the stubborn way of hers, mulish and unyielding, and he growled in frustration.

Stabbing the tip of his greatsword into the dirt, he ignored the stains on its surface dripping into the ground below. No one would notice amongst the already numerous stains left by their battle. He would pay later, need to spend extra time with the sharpening stone, but frustration at Hawke overruled logic. His hands now free, Fenris moved closer to where Hawke stood wiping her hands on her robes and grimacing as they left dark streaks across the blue cloth. Leaning close to Hawke to ensure she heard, he hissed, “It cannot wait. They could be blood mages.”

She looked up at him, not at all intimidated by his greater height, and narrowed her eyes. “Look at them, Fenris,” she said, and he followed the motion of her hand to where the mages had gathered, their faces pale even in the warm orange light. “They’re terrified. If they wanted to, they could use blood magic right now. There’s more of them than there were of the mages who attacked. And we’re tired. Or I am. But they’re not doing anything.”

Fenris growled his frustration, but with Hawke, the right words to convince her never seemed to appear. She confounded him. “You cannot trust them,” he finally said. He knew it was not enough.

Hawke reached out as if to pat his shoulder, but let her hand drop before making contact. He ignored the pang of disappointment. “Do you trust me, Fenris?” she asked.

A complicated question. “Mostly.”

“Everyone deserves to be free, Fenris,” she said softly before turning to head in the direction of the other mages.

She moved over to one of the younger mages who was white with fear, speaking softly as she reached out to pat their shoulder. She moved among the robed figures, speaking to each, a soft word here, assistance lifting bags there, helping the escaped mages gather their things. Her calm demeanour seemed to have taken the edge off the mages’ fear, as their movements became less twitchy, more purposeful. Thrask waited outside the entrance of the cave, unaware of the narrow tunnel that led further into the Sundermount foothills. Or if Thrask knew about it, he had chosen not to mention it.

The mages funneled silently through the narrow opening in the stone, single file. The cave felt smaller, once they were gone, their voices echoing in the now empty space. Hawke and Aveline extinguished the torches as Varric and Fenris searched the bodies for anything of value, mercenaries to the core, and Fenris used a piece of torn off robe to wipe the worst of the gore from his greatsword before he sheathed it. He trailed behind the others as they trekked back through the winding paths back to where Thrask waited.

He stayed silent as Hawke and Varric lied to the Templars. And continued to stay silent as they started the trek back to Kirkwall, barren hills dry and dusty in the mid-afternoon sun. And continued to stay silent some more as they set up camp in a small wooded glen, a narrow, slow-moving stream meandering its way between the trees. Even at the height of summer, the water was icy cold, the result of snow melt from the taller peaks, snowpack slow to fade even in the summer, unpleasantly chilling as they took turns bathing, scrubbing blood and smoke from their hair and bodies. He continued to stay silent, sitting across the fire from where Hawke sat with Varric and Aveline, trading bawdy jokes with the dwarf, each trying to outdo the other, until Aveline’s face was as red as her hair. He did his best to ignore the banter; he wanted to cultivate this bad mood, using it to design clever arguments to convince Hawke that next time, she should not let them go. Maker knows there would be a next time.

Hawke was too trusting, too easy to convince of good intentions. She always showed up at his door, some new mission on the go: take out some raiders, track down some blood mages, capture an escaped prisoner. Sometimes he wondered why he stayed in Kirkwall, but the time to leave never seemed right. Hawke would ask him to come along on another of her hair-brained schemes and he found himself strapping his sword on, grabbing his pack, and following her into a den of wolves.

Or more often, blood mages.

There was something about her that made him want to stay. Maybe it was the white-hot rage in her face when confronted with slavers. Or the compassion in her face as she promised grieving mothers that she would find their children. The sharply sarcastic replies to selfish husbands whose unfaithful wives have gone missing or mine owners who have more concern for their mine than their workers. Or maybe it was moments like this, a circle of light and warmth in the darkness and the laughter of friends. Or the warmth and welcome in her face as she caught his gaze and smiled, inviting him in.

He stood abruptly, slamming him sword back into its sheath and stalking off into the dark. He had no direction, just a need to get away, away from the circle he wondered if he would ever feel a part of. There had never been light before. He found it blinding.

She was light on her feet, but he heard Hawke following, the light shuffle of loose rocks and dry leaves giving her away. Irritation warred with pleasure inside him. She left the warm circle for him. Why did that please him so much?

He stopped at the edge of the creek, far enough from the campsite that he could no longer hear Varric and Aveline, waiting for her to join him. She stepped up beside him (close, too close, she always stood so close). For a moment, there was no sound but the trickle of the water as it continued its inexorable path to the sea.

“You’re angry about earlier.” It was a statement, not a question, and there was no judgement in her voice. He liked that about her. She accepted criticism, and judgement, but still did what she believed was right.

“Yes.”

She sighed and bent to pick up a rock, her loose hair, still damp from her earlier bath, falling forward over her shoulder. She hefted the small stone in her hand as if testing its weight before she threw it into the slow flow of water, the plunk echoing loudly through the quiet night. “They weren’t blood mages, Fenris.”

“Not yet. Give them time, on the run as they are. Desperation creates strange bedfellows.”

She gave him a sideways look, and said, “Isn’t that how you ended up with us? It doesn’t always have to end in blood magic.”

He growled his frustration. She accidentally made his point. “This will end in blood magic, when Danarius comes for me.”

“They’re not Danarius. Neither am I, for that matter. Are you worried that I might turn to blood magic?”

Fenris raked a hand through his hair, frowning down at the stream. The ripples from the stone Hawke threw had disappeared, carried quickly away by the current, even slow as it was. Hawke was different from those others. “They are nothing like you.”

She sighed again, digging her toe into the stones, flipping them over with a flick of her ankle as if she searched for a specific stone. “I have to trust them,” she said, looking down at the work her feet were doing and not at Fenris, “because if I can’t trust them, how can I trust myself? What makes me so special, so much stronger than them?” The words poured out of her now, as if a dam burst. Waving her hand in the direction of the city, she said, low and passionately, “Everyone is relying on me to be this - this strong saviour who takes down raiders and Tal’Vashoth and demons and Maker, Fenris, sometimes I think about how _easy_ it would be, just a little cut and it would be _easy_ but I can’t, and I need to trust that others can’t, too.”

She stood there, panting, still looking at the ground, and Fenris was at a loss. Unflappable Hawke, almost impossible to get a word from that was not a joke, just said more words more seriously than he had ever heard her. “I do not…,” he said, hesitantly, then closed his mouth, searching for the words. He still disagreed with her decision, but this felt a poor time to argue with her. “Would not Varric or Aveline be better suited to discuss this?”

Hawke laughed, a bitter edge to the sound, and Fenris wished for the low chuckle almost as common as her voice itself. “They rely on me, too. You, well, I ask you for favours. You don’t need me to be Messere Perfect.”

“Be that as it may,” he began uncomfortably, but she finally raised her head to look him in the eye, and the rest of what he planned to say died in his throat, unsaid. The moon shone on her face, casting every curve of her face in silver light, and she looked… lonely.

“And what does it matter if I tell you? You already hate me. What are you going to do, judge me more for being weak sometimes? Is that worse than letting mages go, Fenris?” She choked back what was, to Fenris’s shock, a sob. Hawke did not cry. “Some of those mages were _kids_ , Fenris, younger than Bethany was when she…”

Hawke broke off and looked up at the sky, the moonlight shining on the line of water along her lower lashes, a deep, shuddering breath rocking through her frame. Fenris did not hate her, he helped her because he wanted to, because he trusted her, but the all the words that came to mind to deny it felt empty, not enough.

Taking another deep breath and letting it out her mouth, Hawke said, her voice shaking slightly, “I don’t know why I came. Maybe I thought… never mind. I’ll leave you alone.”

He did not want her to leave, not now, not like this, and he reacted without thought. One hand wrapped around her wrist and pulled her to him, the other cupped her jaw and tilted her head and then he pressed his mouth to hers.

_Venhedis_ , what was he doing? It was not right. Hawke’s lips were stiff beneath his, and any moment she would push him away.

But then her lips softened and she kissed him back, and Fenris lost all breath. He traced the shape of her mouth with his, learning the curves of her lips, the edges so often raised in a smile familiar to his eyes, but new to his lips. He stroked his thumb along her cheek, her skin so soft beneath the rasp of his callouses that he half worried of leaving a mark.

Her skin smelled of the cheap soap they brought along every mission, chosen for its effectiveness at removing bloodstains and not for its scent. Her hair sent wafts of a surprisingly feminine floral scent at every tilt of her head, the loose tresses draping down her back. The combination was intoxicating, a contrast between practicality and luxury, a surprising hint of vanity in her choice of hair oil. Fenris caught a lock between two fingers, gently tucking the soft wisps behind her ear, stroking along the shell of her ear. Hawke shuddered and pressed harder into his chest, reaching up to wrap her hands around his neck, and he hummed in satisfaction.

Deepening the kiss, Fenris stroked his tongue along her lower lip, swiping from one corner to another, tracing the length of her smile. She tasted of the wine they had drank earlier, presented with much pomp by Varric, deep and rich, and she opened to him. He swept his tongue into her mouth, teasing at her tongue before he drawing back to press small clinging kisses along her upper lip. He repeated the process, tangling tongues to shallow caresses, enjoying the small frustrated sounds in Hawke’s throat every time he pulled away.

As his mouth teased hers, Fenris’s hand skimmed up Hawke’s arm from her wrist, rough fingers catching on the fine lawn of her shirt. He paused to stroke small circles with his thumb where her shoulder met her collarbone, dipping into the groove before smoothing his hand over and behind, pressing firmly against her back as he drew his hand down, his fingertips bumping along the curves of her spine until he reached the hem of her trousers. Fisting his hand in the soft fabric of her shirt, he tugged it loose from where it had been neatly tucked, dipping his hand beneath the opening now revealed to press it firmly against the small of her back, pulling her harder into his chest.

He caught Hawke’s gasp at the first hot contact of skin on skin in his mouth, and her hand moved to card through his hair, and he –

“Hawke? Broody? You guys okay out there?” Varric’s shout cut through the haze of lust that had overtaken him, a shock to the system as icy as if Varric had thrown a bucket of the stream overtop. Fenris dropped his hands and turned, Hawke’s fingers catching briefly in his hair before he took a step away and braced his forearm onto a convenient tree, pressing his forehead onto his arm as he tried to catch his breath.

Behind him, Hawke cleared her throat and shouted back, “We’re fine. Just… talking.” Fenris noted with no small amount of satisfaction that her voice was nearly as shaky as he felt.

“Tell Broody that if he’s mean to you, I’ll kick his ass!”

Hawke huffed out a laugh, small rustling sounds letting Fenris know she was tidying herself back up, covering up that patch of skin so soft, he felt unworthy of touching it. But he had touched it, and the texture of it burned into his skin. Maybe even into his very soul.

A brief pause, the rustling completed, no sound but the mingled pants of heavy breaths, slowly returning to normal and the steady trickle of the stream.

“So,” Hawke said, her voice almost even. Only the slightest shiver in pitch was detectible now. “You don’t hate me, then?”

“No.” Short and sharper than he meant it to sound, but important.

“Oh.” A pause. “Good.” Fenris listened as she spun on her heels, the rocks crunching beneath her feet, and her light footsteps faded as she walked back to the campsite.


End file.
